VKVassilios Karakoidas
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The Anger of Pharaoh XXXV

The 1996 DOS adventure — an archaeologist lost in a pyramid, trying to escape — playable here, its engine reverse-engineered out of GAME.EXE.

1996–2026JavaScriptReverse engineeringDOS 16-bit

A text adventure written for the course Data Structures in November–December 1996, by AssCoder and ReneGade/TiS — the handle I used then — with graphics by MadMask. You are an archaeologist lost in a pyramid trying to get out, and you type at it: 320×200, 256 colours, DOS and a VGA card. Since September 2026 it runs in the browser too, which is what is below; everything the 1996 page said is further down, as it was written, and the DOS original is still in game.zip at the foot of the page.

320×200, 256 colours, one byte per pixel — as it was. Click the screen to start; sound is the PC speaker.Open in its own tab
type + Enter
verb object, e.g. LOOK ROOM
USE x WITH y
two-object commands
F1
help
F4Esc
options
F5
inventory
↑↓
command history
1–9
answer the spirit
F10Ctrl+X
quit to the title

How to play

Commands are a verb and an object: LOOK ROOM, TAKE EYE, GO NORTH. Two-object commands take the form USE x WITH y (also PUT x IN y). The verbs the parser knows are LOOK, EXAMINE, TAKE, USE, OPEN, CLOSE and GO, each with a few synonyms; objects are named the way the game names them when it describes a room, so read the descriptions. F5 shows what you are carrying.

One quirk is the original's and is kept on purpose: the parser wants a verb, a space, and an object, so a bare LOOK is rejected while LOOK AROUND works. There is no save game. There never was; one of the death screens makes a joke about it.

Walkthrough (spoilers)
  1. Dark room: TAKE EYE, USE EYE WITH PAINTING, GO NORTH.
  2. Corridor: TAKE THING IN THE WATER, EXAMINE THING IN THE WATER (three rocks), GO AHEAD.
  3. Coffin room: USE RED ROCK WITH LEFT TRIANGLE, USE BLUE ROCK WITH RIGHT TRIANGLE, USE GREEN ROCK WITH UPPER TRIANGLE, then TAKE MUMMY, GO DOWN.
  4. Hidden room: USE BUTTON. You get trapped, but both doors upstairs open. GO SOUTH, GO EAST.
  5. Pharaoh room: TAKE VASE, USE SAND WITH VASE, USE VASE WITH SAND WITH PILLAR, TAKE ROCK, GO SOUTH, GO NORTH.
  6. Last room: USE ROCK WITH SOCKET, then answer 2, 1, 1, 2. Every other branch kills you.

Where the browser version came from

The source code was lost long ago, so the 74 KB GAME.EXE was reverse-engineered from the binary and its engine re-implemented in JavaScript: the parser, the script interpreter, the VGA console, the menus, the palette fades and the PC-speaker beeps. The rooms, sprites, texts, puzzles and the spirit's dialogue are read from the original data files — the ones in the zip below — not rewritten. The work was done by Claude Code in September 2026, in one afternoon, from that zip alone; how it went about it is the subject of The Anger of Pharaoh XXXV, reverse engineered.

What is different from the DOS version

  • Quitting returns to the title screen instead of DOS.
  • The palette fades run at a fixed 14 ms per step instead of waiting for the monitor's vertical retrace.
  • Random numbers (the death panels, the error messages) come from the browser, not the PIT timer.

Everything else, down to the key codes and the error messages the parser picks at random, is the original's: each function in the engine carries the offset of the routine in GAME.EXE it reproduces.

Source

The engine, the asset extractor, the analysis scripts used on the binary, and the write-ups of the file formats and of the reverse-engineering itself are at bkarak/pharaoh-xxxv (external link, opens in a new tab). The original DOS files are not in the repository; they are the game.zip below, and the build reads them from there.

The 1996 page

Everything from here down is the original page, transcribed as it was written.

The Anger of Pharaoh XXXV was developed for the course Data Structures in November–December 1996 by AssCoder and ReneGade/TiS. Graphics made by MadMask.

It is a classic adventure from the old times — you are an archaeologist lost in a pyramid trying to escape. You can execute actions by using commands like PUT, GET, LOOK, EXAMINE etc. The program runs in DOS (5.00 or higher is OK I presume) and wants a VGA card and a little memory. It runs OK in Win95 also. The resolution used is 320x200 with 256 colors.

The DOS version

The first room of The Anger of Pharaoh XXXV, running under DOS
The first room of The Anger of Pharaoh XXXV, running under DOS

Downloads

These are the original files, kept as they were published. Most are decades old and are here as a record rather than as working software.